Something’s wrong with my blog, I think…not updating on blogspot…ah well.

So I’m in Guelph now. I went to lie down and take a nap and my parents rushed off somewhere. I have no idea where. The dress thing was this morning and it all happened incredibly fast. I hope I end up with a nice dress. I think I will. She measured me really generally and I’m coming back next week to try on what she has. I’m supposed to have shoes by then, so I guess I know what my job for the week is.

I didn’t realize how not great my dad’s monitor was. I thought this was a great monitor. It all comes down to how it displays my blog.

MOO and the classroom
salmon says screw the research for the triangle kids, they should learn to prog. I’m not so sure. I’m just not sure they should be researching and learning moo at the same time…more like, do a research project in another unit, and bring that project here. Like, if they know from jump that they’re going to be translating one of many projects into an online space…something historical, or literary, or something…or even an issue that’s come up, something they want to work through, like, personal space issues, or something…so that when the get to moo they’re just working from their heads mostly. Or, from notes they took, or from a paper they wrote, or something like that. It’s hard enough to learn the medium, let alone research at the same time…admitedly…and yeah, programming is great, and it lets you do lots of things, but there are a lot of things you can do as a builder. None of the triangle kids have actually tried to do anything that requires prog knowledge…though one wants something like the plague in one of her rooms. The rest have mostly been toying with bots a lot, which is a challenge, and requires no programming. So…..but, no, I wouldn’t be at all opposed to teaching programming to kids pretty quickly, but it would be good to see them understand the prinicples of building first…it would be cool if we had more time.

Moo has upsides of students that I didn’t visualize at all…I always saw it as a space for creating and representing (since that’s what i do), but I didn’t think of it as…well, I did think of it as a literary space, but I never thought about how the moo could encourage literacy. You have to be so precise with moo, if you misspell it won’t understand you in a command. And it’s interesting watching the triangle kids wrestle with spelling in their descriptions. The moo project as we’re running it is a creative writing project before it’s anything else…it’s a creative writing project before it’s even a computer project. It just happens to require a monitor, a keyboard and an internet connection.

So…what if we did have more time…

We talked a bit about whether a theme is a hinderance or not. I have taken both sides of the argument.I still think it would be interesting to do something like this moo project in conjunction with a specific class, like english, or geography, or history, or something…because content is important in the end. Well, it is for me, but that’s what i do, so of course i would think that. I think there’s a lot I’m not thinking of when I say that…I mean, I feel like there are topics I’m missing when I’m thinking about it like that….I guess it’s like my constant criticism of my sister’s art. I tell her, if you’re going to stand up and ask people to listen to you, you’d damn well better have something to say. I’d like to see moo projects say something, use the technology and the progging and everything else as a medium…maybe it would work better in the end if you do one project that’s completely in your head, no research, but a cohesive project just the same, with a prog tutorial (make a simple verb, maybe a personal social verb, or something like that), and THEN a second project that needs to be more…..well, informative? A presentation of information?

I’m so pleased about one of the projects from the triangle program…well, mostly because it’s historical and I kind of pointed out that it would be a good idea…the student just came online now to tell me that he just got back from the library and he learned lots of stuff about being gay in pre-modern Europe, and he’s going to be building that knowledge into his project….*that* is great to hear. Read, process, restructure, present. Fabulous. That’s a skill. I recognize that I’m a bit one-track about how the moo can be used…so I’d like to see what salmon has in mind…

I think the folks are home. More later.